J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 77

Barack Obama is not the biggest author of our current deb...

Barack Obama is not the biggest author of our current debacle. But he is an author. Every time I see his picture, I think of him in January 2010: "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same. (Applause.) So tonight, I'm proposing specific steps to pay for the trillion dollars that it took to rescue the economy last year. Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years..." I still cannot find anyone willing to take ownership fo that policy proposal, so I suspect it same direct from Obama: Paul Krugman: The Legacy of Destructive Austerity https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/opinion/deficits-economy.html: 'A decade ago, the world was living in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Financial markets had stabilized, but the real economy was still in terrible shape, with around 40 million European and North American workers unemployed. Fortunately, economists had learned a lot from the experience of the Great Depression. In particular, they knew that fiscal austerity���slashing government spending in an attempt to balance the budget���is a really bad idea in a depressed economy. Unfortunately, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic spent the first half of the 2010s doing exactly what both theory and history told them not to do. And this wrong turn on policy cast a long shadow, economically and politically... helped set the stage for the current crisis of democracy.... The austerity years left many lasting scars, especially on politics. There are multiple explanations for the populist rage that has put democracy at risk across the Western world, but the side effects of austerity rank high on the list.... Beyond that, I���d argue that austerity mania fatally damaged elite credibility. If ordinary working families no longer believe that traditional elites know what they���re doing or care about people like them, well, what happened during the austerity years suggests that they���re right. True, it���s delusional to imagine that people like Trump will serve their interests better, but it���s a lot harder to denounce a scam artist when you yourself spent years promoting destructive policies simply because they sounded serious. In short, we���re in the mess we���re in largely because of the wrong turn policy took a decade ago...

#noted #2020-01-01

Feminism: I Need to Include Something Like This in My Twentieth Century History Book. But I Would Like Something from 1870-1950���Not Something from 1776 and 1700 and Before...

Plus I am worried that I am, somewhere in here, striking the wrong tone. Yes, many people will find what is below annoying. But will the people annoyed be the people I want this to annoy, or will they be people whom I desperately do not want to read my work and then be annoyed?

2.5: The Arrival of Feminism: In 1764 in Britain���s Massachusetts colony Abigail Smith was 20, and had had no formal education at all: girls weren���t worth it. In that year married a man she had known for five years: the up-and-coming 30-year-old lawyer John Adams. Their daughter Nabby was born the following year, in 1765. There followed John Quincy (1767), Suky (1768, who died at the age of 2), Charles (1770, who died at the age of 10), Thomas (1772), with high probability a couple of (very early) miscarriages from 1774-6, then the stillborn Elizabeth (1777), and (perhaps) another miscarriage afterwards���but I suspect not. She ran their Boston-Braintree household and property operations while he played his role on the large political-intellectual stage, becoming second president of the United States.

Death and disease were, as was the case in the Agrarian Age, omnipresent. Her most famous letter to her husband was written in 1776. A part of it that is rarely���I would say never���excerpted contains these: ���our Neighbour Trot whose affliction I most sensibly feel but cannot discribe, striped of two lovely children in one week������, ���Betsy Cranch has been very bad������, ���Becky Peck they do not expect will live out the day������, ���The Mumps��� Isaac is now confined with it������, and ���your Brothers youngest child lies bad with convulsion fitts������

Her letters tell us that she badly wanted to know what was going on in the world outside her household and the Boston-Braintree circle:

I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may: Where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence? Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals? Are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be?������ and ���I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs������

And note how she cannot say "I think...", even to her ten-years-older husband: she has to say "I have sometimes been ready to think..."

Abigail Smith Adams was not happy about the position of women in society:

By the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness���

Her husband thought this was a great joke:

As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.

This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won't blot it out.

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight���

In some ways Abigail Smith Adams was not typical: literate, smart as a whip, upwardly mobile, upper-class, married to a husband she could talk to.

In other ways she was very typical: subordinated to her husband (and to other male relatives), many of her concerns given little weight, embedded in a social network in which aiding other mothers as they watched and desperately tried to stop their children get sick and die, pregnant (5 years; I don���t know whether she nursed or not, but somebody or somebodies nursed her children for perhaps fourteen years), and, of course, desperate concern for ���our own little flock��� My Heart trembles with anxiety for them������

Being female in the Agrarian Age, back before the Long 20th Century, was not for sissies.

Why male supremacy was so firmly established back in the Agrarian Age is something that is not obvious to me. Yes, it was very important that people who wished to survive should they reach old age���especially women who did not want to be burned as witches���to have surviving descendants. The pressure at all levels of society was immense: Queen Anne I Stuart (1665���1714), the last British monarch of the Stuart dynasty, was pregnant eighteen times: eight miscarriages, five stillbirths, George (who lived only minutes), Mary (premature: lived only two hours), Anne Sophia (who lived only nine months), Mary (died of smallpox before she would have turned two), and William (died at 11 of strep throat).

Anne survived all eighteen pregnancies. Many of her fellow-queens were not so lucky. Of the 45 queens and female heirs-apparent of England from the Norman Conquest through Victoria, seven died in childbed: 15.5%, more than one in seven, among the most cosseted and best-nourished women in England. In the horrible run from Isabelle de Valois in 1409 through Anne Hyde in 1671, six of twenty died in childbed. The last to die in childbed was Crown Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales in 1817.

Yes, back in the Agrarian Age the biological requirements of obtaining a reasonable chance of having surviving descendants to take care of one in one���s old age meant that the typical woman spent 20 years eating for two: 20 years pregnant and breastfeeding. Yes, eating for two is an enormous energy drain, especially in populations near subsistence. Yes, Agrarian Age populations were near subsistence���my great-grandmother Eleanor Lawton Carter���s maxim was ���have a baby, lose a tooth��� as the child-to-be leached calcium out of the mother to build her or his own bones, and she was an upper class Bostonian born in the mid-1870s.

Yes, breastfeeding kept women very close to their children, and impelled a concentration of female labor on activities that made that easy: gardening and other forms of within-and-near-the-dwelling labor, especially textiles.

Yes, there were benefits to men as a group from oppressing women���especially if women could be convinced that they deserved it: ���Unto the woman he said, ���I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband; and he shall rule over thee���������

But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change? Women who are not kept unlettered, barefoot, and pregnant as a matter of course can do more, and we���optimistic���economists have a strong bias toward believing that people in groups will find ways to become, collectively, more productive and then to distribute the fruits of higher productivity in a way that makes such a more productive social order sustainable.

But not.

There were signs of erosion in the bio-demographic underpinnings of high male supremacy even before the Long 20th Century began. But it was over 1870-2016 that these underpinnings dissolved. The number of years the typical woman spent eating for two fell from twenty���if she survived her childbed���down to four, as better sanitation, much better nutrition, and more knowledge about disease made many pregnancies less necessary for leaving surviving descendants and as birth control technology made it easier to plan families. The number of babies per potential mother dropped by about two-thirds.

Thus reductions in infant mortality, the advancing average age of marriage, and the increasing costs of child raising together drove a decrease in fertility. And, after exploding in the Industrial Age, rate of population growth in the industrial core slowed drastically. The population explosion turned out to be a relatively short run thing. And so human population growth went from an approximate doubling each generation to a rate approximately consistent with zero long-run population growth in the advanced industrial economies, with the rest of the world now following along behind. I world that had had perhaps 750 million people in 1800, 1.1 billion in 1870, and 7.4 billion in 2016 now appears headed for a stable population of about 9.5 billion come 2050.������The path of within-the-household technological advance worked to the benefit of the typical woman in the Long 205h Century: dishwashers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, improved chemical cleansing products, other electrical and natural gas appliances, and so on, especially clothes-washing machines���all these made the tasks of keeping the household clean, ordered, and functioning much easier. Maintaining a nineteenth century, high-fertility household was a much more than fulltime job. Maintaining a late twentieth century household could become more like a part-time job. And so much female female labor that had been tied to full-time work within the household because of the backward state of household technology became a reserve that could now be used for other purposes.

My great-great grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson was born in 1855 in St. Louis, MO, a privileged scion of what then qualified as St. Louis���s upper class. Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she received an education���but not a college degree. Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she was not limited to writing private letters to her husband asking him to please ���Remember the Ladies���. 1882 finds her lobbying for raising the age of consent in Missouri, then 12. 1908 finds her on the executive board of the St. Louis Woman's Trade Union League. 1910 finds her, with her daughter and my great-grandmother Florence (���Fonnie���) Richardson Usher, organizing the St. Louis Women���s Suffrage League. And the system��� responded: the 19th Women���s Suffrage Amendment, which had first been introduced back in 1878, was ratified on August 20, 1920.

In response to the declining time demands of within household work and the expanding set of outside opportunities, female participation in the paid labor force surged. In the United States female levels of formal education are now poised to soon surpass male levels.

The move of women from largely within-the-household, unpaid to largely outside-the-household, paid work catalyzed an increase in women���s material welfare and social status. As Betty Friedan wrote in the early 1960s, women could advance toward something like equal status only if they found ���identity���in work��� for which, usually, our society pays.��� As long as women were confined to separate, domestic, occupations which the market did not reward with cash, it was easy for men to denigrate and minimize their competence and accomplishments. As the labor requirements of running a household fell, the wide separation of men���s from women���s roles became harder to maintain���and with it the belief that biology imposed a different, lower status on the female half of the human race.

Institutions and practices derived under the assumption that the overwhelming bulk of the labor force is male, attached to employment full-time over the long term, and has minimal child care and household-maintenance responsibilities held back progress toward something like full economic equality between men and women. Nothing like full equality has yet been established. Male wages and earnings still appeared higher than female wages and earnings by more than could be easily accounted for by differences in education, training, and degree of labor force attachment. There is still substantial discrimination visible, especially in the form of a ���break in labor force participation��� penalty. Today in Denmark���one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, mothers have a 7%-point lower chance of being employed, work an average of 7% fewer hours conditional on being employed, and receive an average of 7% less in compensation conditional on being employed and on working their hours.

In my intellectual discipline, economics, and in my labor market status group, tenured professors, we are now grappling with one of these institutions and practices: that, in the word of my friend and teacher ex-Harvard President Larry Summers, people deciding whether you are going to receive tenure expect that candidate professors in their 20s and 30s have ���near total commitments to their work��� a large number of hours in the office��� a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency��� a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and��� the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job���. This is, Larry said, not a problem that can be solved by talking about how we are all people of goodwill here, singing "Kumbayah", and offering free childcare. Requiring such a near-total commitment work spurt up through one���s 30s does not fit easily or well with female parenthood. The response of universities was to give mothers extra time���extra years to prepare their portfolios for the tenure review. And then gender equality seemed to demand that universities give fathers���especially those who would certify that they had been primary caregivers���extra years on their tenure clocks as well. First-world problem, I know. But a powerful indicator that gender inequality shadows the life of every single woman and girl on this planet.

The effect of this facially-neutral pro-parent policy? It appears to have been that men whose wives gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure increase by 20% . Women who gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure decrease by 20%. The men had spent the extra time writing more articles. The women had spent the extra time eating for two under the heavy biological load of mammalian motherhood.

I see the centrality of the economic and the extraordinary upward leap in prosperity as the principal news that the future will remember from the history of the Long 20th Century. But I am male. If I were female, would I see the demographic transition���the shift of the typical woman���s experience from one of eating for two for twenty years (and of having one chance in seven of dying in childbed) to eating for two for four years���and the rise of feminism as the biggest news?

Quite possibly.

Perhaps we move from ���possibly��� to ���probably��� when we reflect on the connections between the rise of feminism and the demographic transition. As the world became richer���and as knowledge about how to manage public health was slowly and painfully developed���the world saw first a population explosion: The world had grown from 170 million in the year 1 to 425 million in 1500���growth at the very slow walking pace of 0.06% per year that corresponded to the very slow pace of pre-Commercial Revolution technological development. The Commercial Revolution era of 1500-1800 saw population more than double and grow to 900 million. The British Industrial Revolution era of 1800-1870 saw population increase half again to 1.3 billion. And the Long 20th Century saw human population nearly sextuple to 7.5 billion. By and large, even as mortality fell men still wanted many, many children. Women, first, did not have the knowledge that changing public health meant that many pregnancies were no longer necessary to give at least some confidence of great-grandchildren. And women, second, did not have the social power to set their fertility at levels that seemed good to them. Feminism gave them both the knowledge and the social power.

Thus we now appear to be on track to a world with its population peaking at between 9.5 and 10 billion around 2050.

That feminism came late to the initially-poorer regions of the world has been a major cause of the Long 20th Century���s global divergence in living standards and productivity levels. It was not the most important cause: the most important cause was communist central planning���Vladimir Lenin���s belief that one should run an entire economy by generalizing what he saw and guessed about German mobilization for World War I was not the brightest light on the tree of humanity���s good ideas. It was not the second most important cause: that was the slowness with which modern industrial technologies were diffused around the world. But that feminism came late, and so the demographic transition came late, to the poorer regions of the world was the third most important cause: the demographic burdens placed on poor countries by the continued population explosion were heavy���but they are now ebbing, as we now see the demographic transition to not just extended lifespan but to low fertility finish its spread around the globe...

#economichistory #equitablegrowth #feminism #highlighted #slouchingtowardsutopia #2019-12-30

MIT: Data, Economics, and Development Policy MicroMasters...

MIT: Data, Economics, and Development Policy MicroMasters: "The international fight against poverty is more data driven than ever before. Increasingly, understanding and producing rigorous evidence is critical for those seeking to affect change globally, but opportunities to acquire these skills remain limited. To meet this rising demand and equip development professionals worldwide with the necessary tools to make effective decisions on some of the world���s most difficult questions, MIT���s Department of Economics is now offering a Master���s program in Data, Economics, and Development Policy, which combines online coursework with a short residential campus stay... the first Master���s program to be offered by MIT���s Department of Economics... the first program at MIT to exist exclusively in a blended (online/residential) form. All students must first successfully complete the online MITx MicroMasters�� credential at their own pace before applying to MIT for the blended Master���s program. The MicroMasters credential requires learners to pass five rigorous online courses, along with accompanying in-person proctored exams for each course, offered at Pearson Vue testing centers around the world. The semester-long MicroMasters courses are open to learners around the world and offered three times per year. Learners admitted to the blended Master���s program will be credited 48 academic units for the coursework they completed remotely as part of the MicroMasters credential (90 units are necessary for graduation, with the remaining 42 units completed during the residential semester and an approved capstone project) and will be able to earn a Master of Applied Science in Data, Economics, and Development Policy degree within approximately half a year. The first cohort of 20 students is expected to arrive on campus in the academic year 2019 (i.e. the spring semester of 2020)...

#noted #2019-12-31

Lawrence H. Summers: Can Central Banking https://twitter....

Lawrence H. Summers: Can Central Banking https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1164490326549118976 as we know it be the primary tool of macroeconomic stabilization in the industrial world over the next decade?... This is in doubt. There is little room for interest rate cuts. In every US recession since the 1970s, the fed funds rate was cut >500bps. In most, the real rate fell >400bps below the neutral rate. Now, the max. feasible cut is 200-300bps, bringing the real rate only 150-250bps below neutral. This limited space for interest rate cuts is true of the US, which has the highest interest rates in the industrialized world. It is even more true of Europe and Japan. QE and forward guidance have been tried on a substantial scale. We are living in a post QE and forward guidance world. It is hard to believe that changing adverbs here and there or altering the timing of press conferences or the mode of presenting projections is consequential. We usually agree w/ Janet Yellen, but believed at the time of her 2016 Jackson Hole speech -and believe even more in today���s world of 150bp 10yr rates-that her optimism about the existing monetary policy toolkit is misplaced http://federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20160826a.html.... Black hole monetary economics-interest rates stuck at zero with no real prospect of escape - is now the confident market expectation in Europe & Japan, with essentially zero or negative yields over a generation. The United States is only one recession away from joining them. Everywhere in the industrial world, the risks of a sharp upturn in unemployment appear greater than the risks of a sharp upturn in inflation (even though market expectations of inflation are clearly below 2 percent targets). The one thing that was taught as axiomatic to economics students around the world was that monetary authorities could over the long term create as much inflation as they wanted through monetary policy. This proposition is now very much in doubt. Many believe that events proved Alvin Hansen wrong about secular stagnation. On the contrary, the fact that it took WW2 to lift the world out of depression proves his point. Absent the military buildup, a liquidity trap deflation scenario would likely have persisted.... We have come to agree w/ the point long stressed by Post-Keynesian economists & recently emphasized by Palley that the role of specific frictions in economic fluctuations should be de-emphasized relative to a more fundamental lack of aggregate demand.... It minimizes our predicament to see it���as is current consensus���simply in terms of a falling neutral rate, low inflation, and the effective lower bound on nominal rates. Secular stagnation is a more profound issue...

#noted #2019-12-31

John Scalzi (2012): Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wan...

John Scalzi (2012): Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/07/26/who-gets-to-be-a-geek-anyone-who-wants-to-be/: 'The other day CNN let some dude named Joe Peacock vomit up an embarrassing piece on its Web site, about how how awful it is that geekdom is in the process of being overrun by attractive women dressing up in costumes (���cosplaying,��� for the uninitiated) when they haven���t displayed their geek cred to Mr. Peacock���s personal satisfaction. They weren���t real geeks, Mr. Peacock maintains ��� he makes a great show of supporting real geek women, the definition of which, presumably, are those who have passed his stringent entrance requirements, which I am sure he���s posted some place other than the inside of his skull ��� and because they���re not real geeks, they offend people like him, who are real geeks: "They���re poachers. They���re a pox on our culture. As a guy, I find it repugnant that, due to my interests in comic books, sci-fi, fantasy and role playing games, video games and toys, I am supposed to feel honored that a pretty girl is in my presence. It���s insulting��� You���re just gross." For the moment, let���s leave aside the problem of a mentality that assumes that the primary reason some woman might find it fun and worthwhile to cosplay as one of her favorite science fiction and fantasy characters is to get the attention of some dudes, to focus on another interesting aspect of this piece: Namely, that Joe Peacock has arrogated to himself the role of Speaker for the Geeks, with the ability to determine whether any particular group of people is worthy of True Geekdom. This on the basis, one presumes, of his resume and his longtime affiliation as a geek...

#hoistedfromthearchives #noted #2019-12-31

John Scalzi (2010): Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Dow...

John Scalzi (2010): Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Down https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/26/tax-frenzies-and-how-to-hose-them-down/: 'I really don���t know what you do about the ���taxes are theft��� crowd, except possibly enter a gambling pool regarding just how long after their no-tax utopia comes true that their generally white, generally entitled, generally soft and pudgy asses are turned into thin strips of Objectivist Jerky by the sort of pitiless sociopath who is actually prepped and ready to live in the world that logically follows these people���s fondest desires. Sorry, guys. I know you all thought you were going to be one of those paying a nickel for your cigarettes in Galt Gulch. That���ll be a fine last thought for you as the starving remnants of the society of takers closes in with their flensing tools...

#hoistedfromthearchives #noted #2019-12-31

Oh Noes!!: Hoisted from Eleven Years Ago: The New York Times Has Been... Unprofessional for a Long, Long, Time Across a Wide Range of Areas

Hoisted from 2008: Oh Noes!!: "Oh Noes!!
The New York Times crash-and-burn watch continues. To Ben Stein the Times has added...

CATHERINE RAMPELL: 'I���m pleased to introduce Casey B. Mulligan, an economist at the University of Chicago, as the newest addition to our ���Daily Economist��� panel...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Casey Mulligan says���wait for it���that the reason that unemployment is the 7% it is right now rather than the 4.4% it was two years ago because workers today face "financial incentives that encourage them not to work":

Are Employers Unwilling to Hire, or Are Some Workers Unwilling to Work?: 'Employment has been falling over the past year... if total hours worked had continued the upward trend they had been on in the years before the recession, they would be 4.7 percent higher than they are now.... [Today s]ome employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work.... [T]he decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire)...

If the New York Times has a future, it is as a trusted intermediary. This does not help...

#hoistedfromthearchives #journamalism #moralresponsibility #publicsphere #2019-12-31

The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct

Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos, and Amit Seru: The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct: 'We construct a novel database containing the universe of financial advisers in the United States from 2005 to 2015, representing approximately 10% of employment of the finance and insurance sector. We provide the first large-scale study that documents the economy-wide extent of misconduct among financial advisers and the associated labor market consequences of misconduct. Seven percent of advisers have misconduct records, and this share reaches more than 15% at some of the largest advisory firms. Roughly one third of advisers with misconduct are repeat offenders. Prior offenders are five times as likely to engage in new misconduct as the average financial adviser. Firms discipline misconduct: approximately half of financial advisers lose their jobs after misconduct. The labor market partially undoes firm-level discipline by rehiring such advisers. Firms that hire these advisers also have higher rates of prior misconduct themselves, suggesting ���matching on misconduct.��� These firms are less desirable and offer lower compensation. We argue that heterogeneity in consumer sophistication could explain the prevalence and persistence of misconduct at such firms. Misconduct is concentrated at firms with retail customers and in counties with low education, elderly populations, and high incomes. Our findings are consistent with some firms ���specializing��� in misconduct and catering to unsophisticated consumers, while others use their clean reputation to attract sophisticated consumers....

#noted #2019-12-31

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-31:Wikipedia: D��rogeance h...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-31:

Wikipedia: D��rogeance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9rogeance...

John Scalzi: The 10s in Review: Whatever Best of 2010���2019 https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/12/26/the-10s-in-review-whatever-best-of-2010-2019/...

Alissa Wilkinson: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker review https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/18/21021188/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-review-no-spoilers: 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when a franchise gives up. The new movie is a colossal failure of imagination...

David Albouy http://davidalbouy.net/...

Reading List for: The "Classical" Mediterranean Economy https://www.bradford-delong.com/reading-list-for-the-classical-economy.html...

Ian Morris: The Eighth-Century Revolution http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/morris/120507: 'In the eighth century BC the communities of central Aegean Greece... and their colonies overseas laid the foundations of the economic, social, and cultural framework that constrained and enabled Greek achievements for the next five hundred years.... Aegean Greeks created a new form of identity, the equal male citizen, living freely within a small polis... defeated all rival models in the central Aegean, and was spreading through other Greek communities...

Ian Morris: The Growth of Greek Cities in the First Millennium BC https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/morris/120509.pdf: 'I trace the growth of the largest Greek cities from perhaps 1,000- 2,000 people at the beginning of the first millennium BC to 400,000-500,000 at the millennium���s end.... While political power was never the only engine of urban growth in classical antiquity, it was always the most important motor. The size of the largest Greek cities was a function of the population they controlled, mechanisms of tax and rent, and transportation technology...

Max Boot: ���Downton Abbey��� Reminds Us What ���Conservatism��� Really Means https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/downton-abbey-reminds-us-what-conservatism-really-means/2019/12/20/beb5df3e-235e-11ea-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html: 'I can���t stand what American conservatism has become. A movement ostensibly devoted to conserving the best of America is instead tearing down the rule of law and tearing the country apart in order to protect a crude and cruel demagogue. Today���s conservatives equate civility with weakness and moderation with selling out. They celebrate boorish behavior with the mantra ���At least he fights!���...

David Edelstein: Little Women Movie Review: Greta Gerwig���s 2019 Version https://www.vulture.com/2019/12/little-women-movie-review-greta-gerwigs-2019-version.html...

Francis A. Walker (1888): Recent Progress of Political Economy in the United States https://www.jstor.org/stable/2485572?seq=10#metadata_info_tab_contents...

Stephen Chu: _How to Study: The "Levels of Processing" Framework https://www.samford.edu/departments/academic-success-center/how-to-study...

Wikipedia: Spaced Repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition...

Wikipedia: SuperMemo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperMemo...

Melissa Dell: Econ 1342 https://delong.typepad.com/econe_1342.pdf 'This course examines the history of economic growth, beginning with the divergence between human ancestors and other primates and continuing through the end of the twentieth century. Topics covered include the Neolithic Revolution; economic growth in ancient societies; the origins of modern economic growth; theories and evidence about the institutional, geographic, and cultural determinants of growth; the East Asian Miracle; the middle income trap; the political economy of growth; growth and inequality; and theories and evidence about the persistence of poverty in the world's poorest regions. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Economics 1342. Students may not count both ECON E-1340 (offered previously) and ECON E-1342 toward a degree...

Pan Seared Salmon with Lemon Garlic Butter Sauce https://cafedelites.com/crispy-seared-lemon-garlic-herb-salmon/...

Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick: Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442: 'Tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners show[s]... pass-through profit accrues to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Pass-through profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death...

Center For American Progress Action Fund: Trump���s False Promise on GM Factories Closing https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2308407469209592...

Center For American Progress Action Fund: How Trump is Hurting Farmers https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=416723402448900...

Alex Tabarrok: Summers on the Wealth Tax https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/10/summers-on-the-wealth-tax.html...

Rich Miller: Summers Lambasts Warren, Sanders Plans to Tax Wealth of the Rich https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-18/summers-lambasts-warren-sanders-plans-to-tax-wealth-of-the-rich...

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman: Progressive Wealth Taxation https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Saez-Zucman_conference-draft.pdf...

Catherine Rampell: Would a ���Wealth Tax��� Help Combat Inequality? A Debate with Saez, Summers, and Mankiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=oUGpjpEGTfE&feature=emb_logo...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-12-31

Eric Loomis: White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Or...

Eric Loomis: White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/12/white-nationalism-the-working-class-and-organized-labor: 'I have the lead article in the new issue of New Labor Forum.... I explore the dubious media-driven proposition that Trumpism is a specifically working class phenomena instead of a white issue that crosses classes. I then go on to discuss the history of racism within the American labor movement and ask if there���s anything very new about Trumpism anyway. I then muse a bit on how the contemporary reinforces white male domination through things such as the hyper-masculine and extremely white cultural references that dominate much union-branded clothing (More angry eagles! More flags! More language and symbols that would look fine at a Trump rally!). Finally, I urge all readers to completely reject the idea that we have to appeal to some mythical white working class to build for the future, both in terms of electoral politics and in terms of the politics that actually makes more long-term change, such as movement-building, since the actual working class is by far the most diverse part of the nation and is growing more so every day. Anyway, check it out....

https://delong.typepad.com/files/loomis-nationalism.pdf

#noted #2019-12-31